The GOP Big Tent Is Full of Holes

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The GOP Big Tent Is Full of Holes

For Republicans, constructing an information-age political majority means holding together a colaition of freedom-loving libertarians and sex-hating, gun-toting, gay-bashing puritans. Impossible? Probably.

"Pat!... Pat!...Wait up, Pat!" In the parking lot outside the Quality Hotel in Metairie, Louisiana, presidential politics serves up a scene Oscar Wilde might have mistaken for a foxhunt. The unspeakable, David Duke, is chasing the inedible, Pat Buchanan - and the unspeakable is gaining ground fast.

Moments earlier, Buchanan had been doing his tough-on-crime routine for a local "victims rights" group, while Duke roamed around the back of the room, talking up his impending run for US Senate, flashing the "Go-Pat-Go" sticker on his lapel, and telling anyone in earshot that he and Buchanan were "compatriots." But now Buchanan is hustling across the blacktop, glancing over his shoulder from time to time but never veering from the most direct path possible to an idling minivan. He isn't acting like Duke's compatriot; he's acting like prey.

Buchanan knows Duke's deal. Whenever a respectable Republican - or, at least, one more respectable than Duke - comes to New Orleans, the former KKK Grand Wizard makes the scene, then tries to position himself so that the two of them wind up in a newspaper photo together. For Duke, the hope is innocence by association; for the other Republican, the fear (inevitably) is just the opposite. Which is why, the instant Duke draws near, Buchanan's press secretary signals to a couple of beefy volunteers, who close ranks behind Pat, body-blocking Duke from angling into the frame with their man.

No cameras flash. Reaching the minivan, Buchanan turns, grins, mutters a quick "Good to see ya," and disappears.

Back inside the hotel, Duke seems not the least bit bothered. "The Republican Party may have some problems with me, but it has adopted my agenda," he tells me, eerie blue eyes atwinkle. "My message gets the mom-and-pop Republicans - not the ones who vote to protect their economic interests, but the people who are in our party for social reasons. People who don't want America to turn into an immoral, godless, Third World country. People afraid of this cultural breakdown. They're the heart and soul of the Republican Party now. Without them, there never would've been the Republican landslide of 1994, or Newt becoming Speaker, or any of the rest of it."

David Duke is a racist, a demagogue, and a virulent menace who should be plugged up in a bottle and dropped deep into Lake Pontchartrain. He's also got a point about the dynamics of the Republican revolution. Over the past two decades, an influx of cultural conservatives has transformed the GOP. Typically religious, often working class and Southern, almost exclusively white, these voters don't like big government. But unlike the party's tax-chopping and regulation-slashing regulars, they care most about "values." They want to restore morality, not reform Medicare. The deficit issue doesn't move them; abortion and school prayer, gun control and gay rights, do.

In 1994, cultural conservatives got together with economic conservatives and delivered Republicans control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. It was a big, intoxicating victory - the kind that induced big, intoxicated talk. Talk of realignment. Talk of an emerging era of conservative governance. Talk, even, of an information-age political coalition that would rise up and replace the patently dead New Deal majority at the center of American political life.

What the talk glazed over, however, was that the surge of cultural conservatives into the Republican column brought with it a set of tensions so volatile, so explosive, that it threatens the stability of the majority the surge seemingly made possible. Tensions between yuppie libertarians and moderate suburbanites on one hand, and rural reactionaries and hard-core evangelicals on the other. Between the sort of people who support William Weld, the pro-choice and pro-gay Republican governor of Massachusetts, and the sort who worship Ralph Reed, the executive director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. Between conservatives who talk animatedly about information-age political coalitions and those who applauded a recent cover of the right-wing magazine of the moment, The Standard, which featured a sledgehammer crushing a PC monitor, with the headline "Smash the Internet." Tensions, that is, between the kind of folks who vote for Duke (40 percent or so of Louisianans in his two previous runs for statewide office) and the kind of folks who instinctively react to that crowd the same way Buchanan did to Duke himself - by running the other way.

As the Republican primary season began, the party's panjandrums hoped - prayed - that these strains could be swept under the rug until after their nominee was safely ensconsed in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Then Buchanan blew those hopes right out of the water. By finishing second in Iowa and beating Bob Dole in New Hampshire, the self-professed cultural warrior threw the race, and the whole of the GOP, into a state of complete disarray. At that point, Buchanan, Dole and Lamar Alexander were the only plausible candidates still standing, and each was preparing for what seemed likely to be a protracted and bloody battle. Suddenly, the realignment talk was gone, replaced by Dole's grim description of "a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party."

Maybe Alexander or (more likely) Dole will pull it off, winning the nomination and then piecing the party back together again. Yet, even if that happens, the victory may well prove pyrrhic. Even before Buchanan's surge, many thoughtful Republican strategists had begun to realize that the schism between economic and cultural conservatives is, in the long run, too deep to paper over; that their fabled Big Tent, if not yet in shreds, is full of holes.

"What people failed to understand was that our coalition is extremely fragile," says Jeffrey Bell, a prominent cultural conservative. "It might not seem that way, but sometimes a party appears very strong just before it cracks up. Think about the Democrats. In 1964, they were building the Great Society; but by 1968, their party had split wide open.

"It seems perfectly possible to me that the same thing will happen to Republicans this year," Bell goes on. "That we'll win in 1996 - and then watch in horror as the whole thing falls apart in our hands."

It's a frigid week in February - frigid everywhere that's politically happening, at least - and the Republican candidates seem to have decided that the best way to keep warm is to finger as many hot-button issues as possible.

In New Hampshire, Phil Gramm rolls out a new TV commercial titled "Moral Meltdown," focusing on illegitimacy. In Iowa, Bob Dole ambles through the western, heavily Catholic part of the state, accompanied by the arch-pro-life Representative Henry Hyde, in an effort to gin up enthusiasm among the anti-abortion troops. Miles away, Steve Forbes fends off questions about whether he owns "homoerotic art" by Robert Mapplethorpe (actually, it's a seascape), while deep in the Louisiana bayou, Buchanan accuses the publisher of the most heinous sin against decency imaginable. Forbes, he claims, holds "the Bill Clinton position on homosexuals in the military."

A year ago, the idea that the Republican field would be spending the final days before Iowa and New Hampshire making like Salt 'N' Pepa - let's talk about sex! - would have seemed odd. Last February, when all the candidates (save Forbes, who wasn't in the hunt yet) gathered in Manchester for a dinner that was the first major event of the run-up to the nomination fight, only Buchanan and Alan Keyes, the single-issue pro-life crusader, offered up steamy morsels of moralistic fervor. From the other guys, the rhetorical fare was uniformly secular. Cut taxes. Send power back to the states. Whack bureaucrats. Ditto regulations. And, above all, balance the budget. Fresh from their historic victory in the midterm elections of 1994, the Republicans then seemed remarkably unified, and remarkably unwilling to be distracted by social issues.

In large measure, of course, their unity was due to Newt Gingrich, whose Contract with America provided the party with a government-shrinking and procedure-reforming manifesto around which every conservative faction could readily rally. In Washington, this unanimity fueled Republican dreams of a lasting realignment. Bill Kristol, an influential party strategist and now editor of The Standard, dispatched a memo analogizing 1994 with 1930, the year Democrats made their first major gains on the road to the New Deal, and advising his party that "if we play our cards right, there's no reason Republicans can't gain a comparable level of political control." Meanwhile, a solid Gingrich ally, former-Representative Vin Weber, was hard at work on a book about how a "New Majority coalition" was forming "around the principles of the information age Š devolution, diffusion, and connection." The coalition, Weber suggested, was there for the Republicans to lead.

And Weber wasn't alone. Within Gingrich's inner circle, the notion of an information-age majority was the subject of intense theorizing. "The central thesis is, Number One, the federal government is a conglomeration of a lot more power in one place than seems appropriate given the decentralization that people have seen elsewhere," explained Jeffery Eisenach, president of The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Newt-connected, Washington, DC-based think tank. "And Number Two, the government exercises that power through a hierarchical, bureaucratic framework that also seems archaic and out of step with the times. Those simple but big facts are the motivators for the new, information-age coalition."

Yet even in Eisenach's futuristic, inclusive-sounding musing there was a sign of the tensions lurking just beneath his party's triumphalist surface. Asked to describe the characteristics of the new coalition, Eisenach said, "The defining thing is freedom. If you think in terms of the existing coalitions, the Democrats are associated with social freedom and the Republicans are associated with economic freedom. My guess is the new majority incorporates both. So that the challenge for the Democrats is to slough off their economic control freaks, especially the unions, while the challenge for the Republicans is to - well, I don't want to say slough off our social control freaks. Let's just say, we need to find a message of social freedom."

The argument wasn't pure pie in the sky. Across the country, a cadre of governors, including Weld, California's Pete Wilson, and New Jersey's Christine Todd Whitman won handily in 1994 running on a blend of fiscal conservatism and moral tolerance. But the far bigger story of the elections had been the cultural-conservative swing to the GOP. The most elaborate rendition of that story came in a document written by the Republican pollster Fred Steeper, which began circulating, samizdat fashion, from Xerox to fax to Xerox, around the capital in the early months of 1995. Wielding huge wads of exit-poll data, Steeper showed that the most impressive gains Republicans made in 1994 were among Southern whites and born-again Christians. "They are probably responsible for the party achieving what it could not achieve with economic conservatives alone, a Republican Congress," he noted.

This may have been news to some Republicans, but not to Ralph Reed. Claiming 1.6 million members, Reed's Christian Coalition is the GOP's most powerful organized constituency - as powerful, the cherub-faced 34-year-old often brags, as organized labor once was in the Democratic Party. In 1994, one in every three Republican votes was cast by a white evangelical, with fully two in five coming from the broader category of self-described religious conservatives, including Roman Catholics. Having delivered such overwhelming results, Reed and other Christian conservative leaders were in no mood to be ignored, let alone "sloughed off."

More important, they were not all that excited by the talk of balancing the budget, let alone by Third Wave buzzwords like "devolution, diffusion, and connection." Not long after the end of the first 100 days, the Christian Coalition put forward its Contract with the American Family, which called for, among other things, a draconian set of proposals to police indecency on the Net and on cable television, a constitutional amendment to allow some forms of prayer in public schools, and new restrictions on abortion. And Reed minced no words about what he and the Coalition expected from the Republican presidential ticket: that both people on it, as well as the party's platform, be squarely pro-life.

The Coalition's family contract never threatened to divide the party, but Reed's adamance about abortion surely did, though as the year rolled by, the threat seemed to recede. Weld decided against running, and the two pro-choice candidates who had entered the fray, Pete Wilson and Senator Arlen Specter, both crapped out. But then, out of the blue, came the Colin Powell crisis.

Rarely have the divisions among Republicans been laid so bare. For here, in Powell, was an enormously popular figure, an economic conservative and social moderate - pro-choice, pro-gun control - in whom many leading Republican lights (Kristol, former Education Secretary William Bennett, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp) saw the potential for broadening the party's base of support and building a durable electoral majority. How did the social conservatives react? They held press conferences to denounce Powell and to insist that he had no business running for the nomination. One called him "Bill Clinton with ribbons."

"It really was a watershed event," Bell, the cultural conservative, contends. "If Powell had run, it could have torn the party right in two." By resisting the temptation, Powell more or less guaranteed there would be no open rebellion by cultural conservatives in the primary season. But while Reed and his allies could now gaze with satisfaction on a presidential field free of heathens and heretics, they were also looking at one without heroes: with Dan Quayle, Gingrich, and Bennett (whom many had wanted to run, at least until the Powell fracas) on the sidelines, the cultural right found itself without an obvious standardbearer.

Except, that is, for Buchanan. Yet the truth is that, until the last few days before the ballots were cast in Iowa, many Christian conservatives remained surprisingly stand-offish about his candidacy. Although many of the voters on the cultural right are impressively zealous, they also consider themselves pragmatic - and few believed that Buchanan could really win the nomination. In the end, of course, Christians and other culture-cons did indeed line up in a big way behind Buchanan in Iowa and New Hampshire, but only after it was clear in their eyes that they had no other choice.

Two of the serious runners might have provided such a choice: Gramm or Dole. Certainly, both men had tried, courting cultural conservatives with uncommon ardor, doing their best in the last frantic days of pre-primary campaigning to sound like Ralph Reed's evil twins. Of the pair, however, it was Gramm around whom the real mystery hovered, for he was the candidate everyone had always expected to capture the hearts and minds of the cultural right; the candidate, in fact, that many Republicans had regarded as the most likely to bridge the chasm between economic and cultural conservatives, between government-shrinkers and moralists, and emerge as the consensus alternative to Dole. Instead, on February 14, Gramm dropped out of the race.

According to a survey last year in the Los Angeles Times, 48 percent of Republican primary voters own guns. Even so, when the Gun Owners of New Hampshire held its presidential forum in January in Manchester, only two serious candidates, Gramm and Buchanan, showed up. The crowd was predictably crazy, full of dudes in camouflage pants and pistol-packing mamas, including a pair of seventysomething twins in black berets and leather kneeboots. Next to me was a guy in a T-shirt that carried a mock ad for Slick Willie's Brothel: "Call 1-800-GET-SOME - Ask For Madam Hillary."

From the podium, Buchanan sounded more impassioned, but Gramm - who is, unlike Pat, an actual hunter - sounded more sincere. You almost believed him when he boasted about his 82-year-old mother: "She's got a .38 special and she knows how to use it." The crowd lapped it up.

It was, for Gramm, a rare moment. For most of 1995 and into 1996, the Texan senator labored to convince cultural conservatives to support him and not Buchanan. On its face, it seemed a reasonable goal. But, on February 6, it became painfully clear that Gramm had failed. In a stinging upset, he lost to Buchanan in the Louisiana caucuses, a race dominated by Christian conservatives and one that had pitted the two of them head-to-head, smack in the middle of Gramm's political backyard. A week later, in Iowa, the same sort of voters abandoned him wholesale, effectively ending his bid for the White House.

Gramm's difficulties seducing the cultural right stemmed from the fact that, despite an unswerving pro-life record and serious bona fides on most other social issues, he's profoundly squeamish talking about anything other than economics. Last year, in a disastrous meeting with Christian conservative leaders, he famously blurted out "I am not a preacher" and declared himself "uncomfortable with moralizing" when he was asked about using the bully pulpit to push a "pro-family" agenda.

Traveling with Gramm, you realize he wasn't kidding. Even after working doggedly to make inroads on the Christian right in Iowa, his lack of interest in their issues was painfully obvious. Rather than speaking of social decay, or abortion, or even welfare, Gramm often preferred simply to tell audiences that Alan Keyes would get a job in his White House. At a right-to-life lunch in Des Moines last December, Gramm spent nearly 45 minutes talking about the budget, less than five talking about social issues, and exactly one talking about abortion. "It was weird," an activist said afterward. "Doesn't he know what this group wants to hear?"

Buchanan, by contrast, is as good as anyone at reading a crowd - and at bringing it to its feet if what it wants is righteous fervor and moral indignation. Indeed, few pleasures of the 1996 campaign will compare to spending an evening with Buchanan in the heart of the Bible Belt, as he went from church service to church service, from Baptist to Pentecostal, taking to the pulpit, delivering fiery homilies on "the cultural war going on in this country for the soul of America," and being met with rapturous cheers and shouts of "Amen!" and "Say it, Brother Pat!"

Yet whereas Gramm was fine with economic conservatives but suspect among the cultural kind, Buchanan's anti-corporate, anti-free trade, class-war-tinged fiscal policy made him a pariah to much of the party's pro-business base. Cultural conservatism is well and good, but you can't be the Republican nominee if your economic views are closer to Richard Gephardt's than Alan Greenspan's.

Bob Dole's problem was different: he was liked by many factions of his party but loved by none. In a way, he was a victim of his own grasp of this most vexing of dilemmas for the Republican coalition - that many of the measures cultural conservatives desire most are absolutely anathema to the economic conservatives who are equally essential to achieving a governing majority. In large part, the split boils down to class, to the tensions bred by the Republicans' success at attracting blue-collar workers into their fold. The split is real and deep. The assault-weapons ban, which gun owners hate but yuppie surburbanites overwhelmingly favor, is just one example; the Christian Coalition's legislative wish list provides many more.

In 1995, Dole dove to the right, taking on the cultural warrior's role he so manifestly chafes at. He helped the Christian right block Clinton's nomination of Henry Foster for surgeon general. He promised the National Rifle Association that he would roll back Clinton's ban on assault weapons. He filed a bill to abolish the very affirmative action programs he once championed. He publicly returned a campaign check to a group of gay Republicans. And, most splashily, he gave a speech attacking Hollywood that was the biggest hit with the family-values mafia since Quayle did Murphy Brown (so to speak).

This litany of prostrations helped Dole on the cultural right, but only a bit, since he later retracted - or softened, or hedged, or simply conveniently forgot about - several of them. After Clinton's largely favorable review of affirmative action and the public's largely favorable response, Dole seemed to lose interest in scrapping the programs. After a flap about the gay group's contribution, he said that he thought returning it was a bad idea. And not long after his promise to the NRA, his aides began quietly telling the press that Dole had decided that, too, was a mistake.

Any candidate interested in appealing to the party's ascendant wing and in winning 51 percent of the vote would seemingly have little choice but to attempt a balancing act no less tricky - and no less transparent - than Dole's. But what if there were a Republican taking a different tack? What if there were a candidate who tried to deal with the tensions in the coalition by downplaying cultural conservatives and focusing on economic conservatives and social moderates instead?

As it happens, one did. Yet that, too, required a balancing act - an act that proved no less delicate and, thanks to the man on the high wire, no less impossible to pull off.

Night has just fallen on Concord, New Hampshire, and so has the spotlight on Steve Forbes's candidacy. It's his first trip back to the state after becoming an object of media fetishism, and the questions are bearing down on him fast and furious. As he walks into a Hawaiian restaurant, where a Don Ho tape is purring on the sound system, Forbes finds himself face-to-face with someone from the National Abortion Rights Action League, who asks if he supports Roe v. Wade.

The face goes blank; you can almost hear the cassette clicking into place in his frontal lobe. "I want to see abortions disappear, but that will take a change of heart and a change in the culture before we can change the law," Forbes says.

Yes, the NARAL woman says patiently, but do you support Roe v. Wade?

"I oppose late-term abortions. I oppose abortion for sex selection. I oppose mandatory federal funding of abortion. As a father of five, I'm in favor of parental notification," he replies. "After that, to change the law we need to change the culture."

"So are you saying you want to change the law?" the woman persists, all valiance, all futility. "That would mean you oppose Roe v. Wade, which is the law, correct?"

"I want to change hearts and minds, so that we'll have a country in which there are no more abortions," he says, then smiles, then ducks downstairs.

On abortion, ducking was Steve Forbes's specialty - and no wonder. In his mercurial rise to the top tier of the Republican heap, Forbes managed to steer almost entirely clear of social issues. He was a pure economic conservative, with an apparently strong libertarian bent when it came to all matters moral. This alone was enough to land Forbes in trouble with the Ralph Reeds of the world, let alone the Christian conservative leaders who make Reed seem a saintly moderate. (How do you think the Mapplethorpe rumors got started?)

It was a difficulty the multimillionaire publisher and suspected space alien only exacerbated when he declared in Iowa - accurately but impoliticly - that the Christian Coalition "does not speak for most Christians." A week later, his campaign was headed down the drain.

Yet despite Forbes's larger failure, his artful fudge on abortion appeals to many leading Republicans. Bennett, Kristol, and, not least, Lamar Alexander, argue that the party must declare itself officially pro-life, dedicating itself to enacting whatever restrictions are possible under current law, but abandon the hard-core anti-abortion language of the 1992 platform.

"It'll never work," laughs Jeffrey Bell. "It's basically no different than being pro-choice. A proposal like that would cause a huge fight at the convention." The day after Forbes's encounter with NARAL, Alexander tells me he thinks an abortion battle at the convention is pretty much inevitable. Will the battle be big? "Probably." Will it be bad for the party? "Not good. Yeah, bad."

So this is what the Republicans have to look forward to in the year that was supposed to herald the arrival of a new era of conservative rule? A rerun of the 1992 convention, only this time with a legitimized Pat Buchanan controlling a substantial block of delegates, and an emboldened Ralph Reed loin-girded for Armageddon? A presidential candidate who, at the time of this writing, seemed likely to be either a septuagenarian senator or a plaid-shirted pretender? And a fall campaign in which the GOP could see its coalition, assuming it's still in one piece, sliced to ribbons by Ross Perot, who is now apparently planning to launch himself at the White House, and whose populist appeals may find purchase in the fields of discontent that Buchanan tilled so vigorously this winter and spring?

"I think it's now very clear that 1996 is not the realigning election," Eisenach allows. "For one thing, the leadership of the two parties is still an industrial-age leadership. There are exceptions: Newt's an exception. Al Gore's an exception. [Democratic Senate Minority Leader] Tom Daschle, frankly, is an exception. But, by and large, the leadership of the two parties doesn't get it yet."

Obviously. But perhaps the truth is even starker. It may be, as the political theoretician Kevin Phillips has argued, that we are entering an era in which realigning elections are themselves obsolete. Perhaps what lies in store for our politics is a period of structural disarray, with, as Phillips puts it, "the major parties fading and splinter parties growing ... leaving the GOP and the Democrats as untrusted, partly burnt-out" institutional leftovers.

If so, it will be for good reason. For some time now, it's been achingly clear that the Democratic Party is a hopeless mess - a dwindling assortment of fads and factions with vanishingly little binding them together apart from historical circumstance. The Republicans, by contrast, were said to know who they were. They wanted, as Gramm put it, less government and more freedom. Well, it turns out that wasn't quite right. It turns out that the fastest-growing slice of the Republican Party does want more freedom - unless it leads to what cultural conservatives see as moral turpitude. And, yes, they do want less government - unless that would further unravel the "traditional values" they champion.

"If the Republicans didn't have that authoritarian, culturally conservative wing of their party, I'd be real scared of what they could do," says Al From, head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

As the Republican men who would be president have already learned, coping with this wing makes it difficult to fly straight, much less soar high. Then again, as long as the debilitated model of party politics endures, they won't be able even to get off the ground without it.-